As near as I can figure the above-mentioned young men were the only reason there was a yesterday at the Canadian Figure Skating Championships.

There were 481 fans in the stands. The TV truck, which wasn't there for the women's qualifying the day before, showed up overnight. There was a full panel of judges. A referee. Coaches. A couple hundred volunteers. Support staff. Security people. And a press room full of media members.

All for Ali, Eaton, Eden, Dufour, Geleynse, White and Winter.

They were the guys who didn't make the cut in the men's qualifying event, which is worth 20 per cent of the final standings but not worth 20 cents in terms of watching.

The above named Canadian group of seven was the reason everybody was there at 9 a.m. The other 24 guys move on to the short program when the competition gets serious, when they turn the TV cameras on and the crowds come.

Yesterday was a joke.

We're all used to going to the rink to find out which Emanuel Sandhu will skate that day, Emanuel Hyde or Emanuel Jekyll.

The brutal one showed up, not the brilliant one who won the Grand Prix Final a couple of weeks ago in Colorado Springs.

NO POINT

But he didn't give a spit.

"It's qualifying," he said.

"There's really no point in saying anything. The rest of the week is what it is all about.

"Qualifying is not that big a deal."

Sandhu put a hand down on his quad, popped an Axel, two-footed a loop, popped a Lutz and doubled the back ends of what were designed to be a pair of triple-triples.

Jeffery Buttle, Ben Ferreira and Jayson Denommee all skated better than he did in finishing 1-2-3 in the first group. But Sandhu came the rink knowing it didn't matter what he did, he was going to be the best of his bunch (and thus tied for first with Buttle going into the short) no matter what.

McLeod tried to point out a few positives in the mess Sandhu made.

"It looks messy," she said. "But he did quad/double toe and triple Axel-triple toe," she said of the big-time combination packages.

"It looked a little junky, but at Emanuel's level when it comes to qualifying, you know you can make a few mistakes."

More than a few.

Sandhu said he was happy with the day because he didn't get drawn in the first group.

"Those guys had to get up at 4 a.m.," he said of pre-event practice times. "I had to get up at 7 a.m. and that's way too early for me."

EARLY TO RISE

Getting up at 4 a.m. was three hours before Fedor Andreev got in.

"I was supposed to go from Detroit to Minnesota to Edmonton and get in at 1 p.m., but I was stranded in Minnesota for nine hours," said the Ottawa skater who is currently training in Michigan and points out that for 95 per cent of the skaters, every day here costs money out of their own pockets. Andreev was at least delighted to find out he was in the second group and didn't have to get up a couple of hours after finally putting his head on a pillow.

"If I had been in that first group ... oh, man. I might as well not have gone to bed.

"Considering all that, it felt pretty good," he said of the exercise. "I made a couple of stupid mistakes, but ..."

We know.

It was qualifying.

He goes into the short tied for third with Edmonton's Ferreira, who along with Asbestos, Que., skater Denommee, took the day seriously.

"Considering it was 9 a.m., I was happy with that," said Ferreira.

"I landed the quad in practice. I thought that was good," he said of doing it in his sleep.

"But I ended up tripling it."

Buttle scored best of them all, his marks ranging from 5.1 to 5.8 on the technical line to from 5.5 to 5.9 on the artistic end. But even he wasn't happy.

"If I look at anything good, I guess it was that I got the Axel done."

He singled it the first try, doubled it the second and finally tripled it on the third, the figure skating version of hitting for the cycle, but only in qualifying at Canadians can you play around to the point where you take three tries at landing a jump."

So why IS there qualifying?

SAME PROCESS

Because they have it at Worlds and the tall foreheads of Skate Canada want to have our skaters go through the same process at Canadians as they will at Worlds.

That's fine if they treat it that way, but the guys we're most likely to send to Worlds damn sure didn't yesterday.

The idea is also not to have skaters pay for trips to sectionals to cull the field there and then have to pay again to get to Canadians, only to finish 24th. This makes it one trip instead of two.

Like it makes more sense to bring in all the judges, coaches, staff, officials, media, etc., not to mention pay rent on an NHL building for two or three extra days with nobody in the seats and force the NHL team to take a six-day road trip instead of a four-game road trip ...